What’s Up With White Women—And White Men?

Since I began writing for VDARE.com, FrontPageMagazine.com, and American Enterprise.com in 2001, there is one article that has been more often quoted than any other: What’s Up With White Women? (It appeared on FrontPageMag May 18, 2001, but is no longer available on in its website). There is something in this article that has been considered fundamentally important by authors with such diverse approaches to as Pat Buchanan (The Death of the West, pp. 155-156), Robert Spencer (The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades pp. 177-179 and Religion of Peace pp. 2-3), and most recently, Michael Medved (The 10 Big Lies About America, pp. 9-10).

My original article was meant to call attention to the fact that the attitude of white women in America is an indication of where the country stands—and, specifically, where white men stand. As an American Indian, I had occasion to recognize this in a way that apparently spoke very deeply to white men in this country who are concerned about the future.

White men don’t stand in a very good place, according to many white women. White men have failed.

This article came about as the result of a simple exchange between myself and a white female student, back when I was teaching at Oklahoma State University (Oklahoma City campus). It began:

"Look, Dr, Yeagley, I don’t see anything about my culture to be proud of. It’s all nothing. My race is just nothing.”

The girl was white. She was tall and pretty, with amber hair and brown eyes. For convenience’ sake, let’s call her ‘Rachel.’

I had been leading a class on social psychology, in which we discussed patriotism – what it means to be a people or a nation. The discussion had been quite lively. But when Rachel spoke, everyone fell silent.

"Look at your culture," she said to me. "Look at American Indian tradition. Now I think that’s really great. You have something to be proud of. My culture is nothing."

"You’re not proud to be American?" I asked.

"Oh, I’m happy to be American, but I’m not proud of how America came about."

Her choice of words was telling. She was "happy" to be an American. But not "proud" of it.

On one level, I wasn’t surprised. I knew the head of our American History department at Oklahoma State University-OKC, and I recognized his hackneyed liberal jargon in Rachel’s words. She had taken one of his courses, with predictable results.

Yet, I was still stunned. Her words disturbed and offended me in a way that I could not quite enunciate.

I could hardly concentrate the rest of the day. I lay awake that night thinking about what she had said.

“Rachel”, I called her, said that she was ashamed of American culture. She essentially denied that there was any. On the other hand, she extolled me and American Indian people for the honorable culture of Indian Country, and the fact that it is still here.

I found this astounding, and deeply disturbing. On the one hand, I was proud to say that it took the greatest culture in the world to defeat the Indians. But, on the other hand, if this young heiress of America considered her own culture to be “nothing”, then what did that say of mine?

Central to my telling of this modern tale of cultural clash was the quotation of a Cheyenne saying, a proverb, whose source by this time I don’t even remember. It’s just a simple, obvious, dramatic fact: “A nation is never defeated until the hearts of its women are on the ground”

Rachel’s heart was on the ground.

My article continued:

"As I lay awake that night, I thought of an old story by Kay Boyle, written in 1941, called Defeat. It’s about the French women in the German-occupied village of Pontcharra. All the French men were away at war. It was the 14th of July, Bastille Day, when Frenchmen were usually proud to be French. The village women, however, chose that day to give in to the German men.

They did it innocently enough. The women just wanted to wear their fancy holiday dresses. They wanted to drink and dance. And the Germans were the only men around with whom they could do it.

So they gave in."

I propose that, with the recent presidential selection in America, the hearts of most white women are on the ground. That a near-majority of white women—46% as opposed to 41% of white men—ended up voting for a dubious figure of impossible identity, an alien black African leftist, is something to take serious note of. And I have no doubt that girls like “Rachel” were the reason whites aged 18-30 did vote solidly for Obama, the only white group to do so.

Now, authors like Buchanan, Spencer, and Medved each respond to this matter of my article in different contexts.

Buchanan saw Rachel’s attitude as being the result of “antihistory” which was “killing love of country”.

Spencer sees it as an expression of the anti-white racism that would debunk all Western (i.e., “white”) civilization altogether. This, Spencer says, is part of what has prepared the way for the invasion of Islam in the modern world. It is the essential self-abasement when has nearly destroyed modern Europe’s resolve to preserve itself from Islam.

Medved’s use of What’s Up With White Women? is found in his introduction. It is America-specific, and speaks directly to the issue of America’s pride. Medved argues that America need not be ashamed.

Inevitably, the very first issue he addresses is American Indian encounters. The first “lie” he wants to remove is the thought that America Indians were pristinely abused and America is therefore forever branded as evil. Medved cites “Rachel’s” lament as simply an example of the shame he wants to remove. He disputes the cause of that shame. The encounter with the American Indian was not as outrageous as liberals would make it. Medved uses historical references and bases his moral arguments on those. Specifically, the devastations of small-pox on Indians, says Medved, cannot be attributed to any intent of the American government.

Ann Coulter would certainly agree on that point. When she did the Bad Eagle Interview with me (The Great White Woman Speaks, October 19, 2006), she pointed out that Pasteur’s science of contagion was not known until the late nineteenth century, long after small-pox had done its evil work on the Indian population.

And everyone knows, Ann Coulter’s heart is not on the ground!

But apparently authors like Buchanan, Spencer, and Medved fear that the hearts of many white women are. My article strikes deep, like an arrow piercing the heart. The men of no race or ethnicity want to see their women falling at the feet of foreigners.

I concluded

"It gives me no solace to see the white man self-destruct. If Rachel’s people are 'nothing,' what does that say about mine?

I believe in my Comanche people. I know that someday we’ll stand as equals before the white man, strong, prosperous and self-sufficient. But we won’t get there by listening to empty praise from guilty white women. We’ll get there by studying the white man’s ways and learning to be strong as he is."

Of course, this does require white men to be strong.

Dr. David A. Yeagley [email him] is an enrolled member of the Comanche Nation (Lawton, Oklahoma). His articles have appeared in TheAmericanEnterprise.com, FrontPageMagazine.com, VDARE.com, and on his own web site, BadEagle.com. He is a speaker for the Young America’s Foundation, and for the John Birch Society. David Yeagley’s columns for VDARE.COM include An American Indian View of Immigration, and To Deport or not to Deport. David Yeagley is the author of Bad Eagle: The Rantings of a Conservative Comanche and Altered States: The State of the Dead and the State of the Holy. Dr. Yeagley has contributed to Persian Heritage Magazine and served its editorial board since 1998. Recently, Dr. Yeagley was commissioned by the Oklahoma Historical Society to write a symphonic music score for the 1920 silent movie, “Daughter of Dawn”. Release date is projected in 2009.